1-800-Flowers.com

One of the benefits of VoIP is scalability, that is, the ability to add CSRs without having to install extra phone lines. Multichannel merchants 1-800-FlOWERS.COM and Vermont Teddy Bear have dealt with issues of seasonal scalability by working with Golden, Colo.-based Alpine Access, a provider of home-based CSRs. Vermont Teddy Bear, for instance, finds that its sales spikes come around Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, with each holiday rush lasting only about two weeks. While Chris Powell, contact center manager at the Shelburne, Vt.-based gift merchant, triples his in-house staff during this time, he still needs more reps to answer phones, especially as radio ads

&000;&000; Over the years, I've made plenty of catalog purchases, but rarely simply because I was a catalog business editor. I only turned to catalogs when I needed something unusual or came across a killer sale. Otherwise, I bought my mainstream goods off the rack. Today, that's changed. And the two vehicles that have impacted me the most have been the coming of age of e-mail and the remarkable ease of search engines. I find e-mail's impact on me surprising, because less than five years ago, I'd delete any personal e-mail from just about any address I didn't recognize. But now, I

Over the years, I’ve made plenty of catalog purchases, but rarely simply because I was a catalog business editor. I only turned to catalogs when I needed something unusual or came across a killer sale. Otherwise, I bought my mainstream goods off the rack. Today, that’s changed. And the two vehicles that have impacted me the most have been the coming of age of e-mail and the remarkable ease of search engines. I find e-mail’s impact on me surprising, because less than five years ago, I’d delete any personal e-mail from just about any address I didn’t recognize. But now, I find myself looking

When evaluating future technology acquisitions, make services-oriented architecture a key selection criteria. A new breed of software application has emerged over the last few years that has changed the dynamics of online product search within multichannel marketers' Web sites. Advanced search engines are becoming "must haves" on catalogers' lists of next-generation e-commerce features. Advanced search technologies differ from traditional, structured search approaches that rely on simple keywords and description indexes. Today's better Web sites allow for searches that automatically categorize results sets by navigable counts of relevant subsets of data. For example, a customer's search for "denim" may

More than 65 percent of all shoppers indicated that second to winter holiday shopping, they do most of their shopping in the spring and summer, according to a bi-weekly shopping survey recently released by WSL Strategic Retail. The survey of 1,514 shoppers revealed, among other things, that gender doesn’t impact seasonal shopping, but age and income do. Other results included: * 45 percent of adults ages 18-34 indicate summer as their primary buying season. * 38 percent of adults over 55 indicate spring as their favorite buying season. * 36 percent of adults ages 35-54 indicate summer as their primary buying season. * 38

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to boost response from your opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns, you’re not alone. Many multichannel marketers are chanting the same mantra — and with good reason. E-mail click-to-purchase conversion rates and number of orders per e-mail delivered by retailers and catalogers continues to increase, according to DoubleClick’s Q3 2004 E-mail Trend Report. But other e-mail marketing statistics are less encouraging. For instance, revenue per e-mail delivered is declining, as is median order size. Moreover, open rates for offers made by retail and catalog companies were the lowest among those categories tracked by DoubleClick — 30.8